Mary Morison Webster

Mary Morison Webster Schikkerling (26 January 1894^[1] – 1980) was a Scottish-born literary critic, novelist and poet who moved to South Africa with her family in 1920.

Mary Morison Webster
Born	26 January 1894 Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.
Died	1980(1980-00-00) (aged 85–86)
Occupation	Poet, writer
Language	English
Nationality	South African

Biography

Webster was born and raised in Edinburgh, the daughter of Robert Smith Webster and Eliza Ronald Webster.^[2] For most of her adult life she lived in Johannesburg, where she was married to Roland William Schikkerling in 1920; they divorced before 1930.^[1][3] She was an influential book reviewer for The Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times for 40 years.^[4] She wrote five novels, including one in collaboration with her sister, novelist Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, who died in 1934,^[5] and several collections of poetry. Webster died in 1980, in her eighties.^[6][7]

Reception

Webster's first collection, To-Morrow (1922), was briefly reviewed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, where the anonymous reviewer found the book "pleasant, easy to read and to enjoy... not tremendous at all, but with many glints of beauty and womanly wisdom."^[8] A more recent literary scholar found that "Webster developed a precocious formal and technical competence," but that her focus on personal suffering and despair failed to acknowledge larger structural causes of individual distress.^[3] Guy Butler recalled meeting Webster in her later years: "The aging poetess had a somewhat long, sad physiognomy and had dressed her hair with a symbolic wreath of tinsel laurel leaves," he wrote. "The effect was quite startling."^[9]

Nuruddin Farah's novel Sweet and Sour Milk (1980) begins with a quote from Mary Morison Webster's poetry as an epigram.^[10]

Publications

Poetry

Webster's poems appeared in magazines, and were chosen for anthologies including The Bookman Treasury of Living Poets (1928),^[11] The Penguin Book of African Verse (1968),^[12] and The New Century of South African Poetry (2002).^[13][14]

• "Rencontre" and "World's End" (1920)^[15]
• "The Organ Donkey" (1921)^[16]
• "After Death – Spring 1915" and "Gallipoli" (1922)^[17]
• To-Morrow (1922)^[8]
• "Two Songs in Autumn" (1928)^[18]
• The Silver Flute (1931)
• Alien Guest (1933)^[19]
• Garland in the Wind (1938)
• Flowers from Four Gardens (1951)
• A Litter of Leaves (1971)
• Rain After Drought

Novels

• Evergreen (1929)
• The Schoolhouse (1933)
• High Altitude (1949, with Elizabeth Charlotte Webster)
• The Slave of the Lamp (1950)
• A Village Scandal (1965)